Ms Saoirse Brady:

On the shutting down of schools, we do get calls around that but our understanding is that there is a huge amount of pressure on the Irish Prison Service in terms of court escorts and resources sometimes have to be diverted for that. Some 100 extra officers were allocated for education in last year's budget but I do not think that was necessarily ring-fenced, and some of those have been put in place but not all.

On the resources piece, we would be very concerned that it talks about “available resources”. Ultimately, the Irish Prison Service has a duty of care to the people in its custody so it should not be limited by resources in terms of how it provides for those people. We have a situation at the moment where there is overcrowding and people are sleeping on mattresses. That is not conducive to anybody's rehabilitation so we need to address it and ensure there is investment in any new structure that has gone in. The Irish Prison Service can ask for what it needs and it should ensure it is granted sufficient resources.